Carried forward amid an ocean of cheering
refugees in the Stankovic refugee camp, Madeleine Albright could hardly
contain her excitement. "We have been victorious," the secretary
of state shouted triumphantly to the roaring crowds, "and Milosevic
has lost!" As she spoke, Slobodan Milosevic issued orders in Belgrade;
Russian troops, with his happy connivance, marched into Pristina, embarrassing
their supposed NATO allies. And more than eight hundred fifty thousand
Kosovar Albanians languished in their tent cities in Albania, Macedonia,
and Montenegro.

"We have fought this war so the refugees can go home," Albright
told them, showing a more persuasive grasp of theater than of logic: two
and a half months before, few of the men, women, and children surrounding
her had been refugees. Addressing his countrymen on the eve of the war,
President Clinton had announced quite a different goal. "We act,"
he told Amer-icans on March 24, "to protect thousands of innocent
people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive…. We act to prevent
a wider war, to defuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe, that has exploded
twice before in this century with catastrophic results."

President Clinton's geography, and his history, were as uncertain as
his secretary of state's logic, but his argument came through with admirable
clar-ity: "By acting now, we are upholding our values," he said.
"Ending this tragedy," he said, "is a moral imperative."

Fine words on which to launch a war, and it is against them that the
Kosovo "victory" must now be judged. How does one prepare a
moral balance sheet? Begin with brute facts: before, a small province
torn by a low-level guerrilla uprising and a savage counterinsurgency
staged to suppress it; tens of thousands of people homeless, perhaps two
thousand dead.

And after? A land destroyed; countless houses and schools burned; nearly
a million people stripped of their homes, their belongings, their identities,
deported and displaced. And finally—critical spaces still blank on
the balance sheet—scores, perhaps hundreds, raped; thousands, perhaps
many thousands, dead.

Brute facts are not all, of course. That "moral imperative"
can be extended, telescoped, as President Clinton recognized on March
24:

All the ingredients for a major war are there. Ancient grievances, struggling
democracies and in the center of it all, a dictator in Serbia who has
done nothing since the Cold War ended but start new wars and pour gasoline
on the flames of ethnic and religious division.
Mr. Milosevic, of course, rules still in Belgrade. As for his policy of
sowing "ethnic and religious" division—which, unopposed,
had produced a Croatia "cleansed" of Serbs and an ethnically
partitioned Bosnia—the West was now forced to confront it:

All around Kosovo, there are other small countries, struggling with their
own economic and political challenges, countries that could be overthrown
by a large new wave of refugees from Kosovo.
And yet, during the weeks after the President spoke, that "large
new wave" of refugees that the war was intended to forestall did
indeed break on the shores of Albania and Macedonia, rendering increasingly
unstable this "major faultline between Europe, Asia and the Middle
East," and making likely a partitioned, or solely Albanian, Kosovo.

Yes, Milosevic's calculated savagery produced
the refugees; the blame must be laid at his feet. Not entirely, though:
at Rambouillet American and Western diplomats practiced a statecraft that
was ill-prepared, fumbling, and erratic, and no one can say what Kosovo
might look like—and how many Kosovar Albanians might still be alive—had
Secretary Albright not handed to the Serbs an arrogant ultimatum whose
consequences she and her fellow diplomats confidently predicted (a quick
capitulation, or at the very least a rapid Milosevic retreat), and which
they got precisely and historically wrong.

"We learned some of the same lessons in Bosnia just a few years
ago," Mr. Clinton advised Americans as the bombs began to fall. "The
world did not act early enough to stop that war either."

And let's not forget what happened. Innocent people herded into concentration
camps, children gunned down by snipers on their way to school, soccer
fields and parks turned into cemeteries. A quarter of a million people
killed….
At the time, many people believed nothing could be done to end the bloodshed
in Bosnia. They said, "Well, that's just the way those people in
the Balkans are."
Who were these "many people" who "believed nothing could
be done"? President Clinton's first secretary of state, Warren Christopher,
perhaps, who in May 1993 called to mind Neville Chamberlin in describing
Bosnia as "a humanitarian crisis a long way from home, in the middle
of another continent"? Or President Clinton himself, who, in explaining
why "the United States is doing all we can to try to deal with that
problem," had noted that in Bosnia "the hatred between all three
groups is almost unbelievable…. It's almost terrifying…. That
really is a problem from hell…."

In the Clinton White House nothing is more ephemeral than history. In
Bosnia, as the President now recalled it, "We and our allies joined
with courageous Bosnians to stand up to the aggressors" and thereby
learned that "in the Balkans, inaction in the face of brutality simply
invites brutality. But firmness can stop armies and save lives."

In Bosnia, of course, such "firmness," in the form of aerial
bombardment, came from a paralyzed America only after three years of genocidal
war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In Kosovo, the
firmness came in the same form; but it did not "stop armies,"
at least not for seventy-nine days, and it is a difficult argument to
make that it saved lives—or at least that it saved Kosovar lives.

American lives of course it did save. Amid the carnage of Kosovo, and
the more than 1,200 civilian deaths in Serbia, not a single American airman
or soldier, indeed not a single member of the Western alliance, died;
not one suffered injuries. And here we reach the bleak underside of President
Clinton's "moral imperative" as it was played out during those
seventy-nine days. For Kosovo represents the grail which American leaders
have been seeking for decades: the politically cost-free war.

Call it the Athenian Problem: How can a
democracy behave as a world power? How might its citizens—used to
rousing themselves to an interest in world affairs only during wartime,
and lethargically even then—be persuaded to send its sons to fight
in battles far away, in places apparently unrelated to the country's defense?
American leaders have found the political costs of such persuasion to
be high and have shown over the decades a growing eagerness to avoid them—by,
for example, masking the country's foreign policy with covert action,
as Eisenhower did by overturning governments in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala
in 1954; or by refusing to order full mobilization and otherwise minimizing
the cost and extent of war, as Johnson did in Vietnam.

Technology, America's most cherished faith, has carried the country a
long way since then, making the immaculate war possible; but the sentiments
behind that goal, the reluctance of American leaders to risk their political
capital to persuade the people of a war's necessity, have grown ever more
vehement. "Americans are basically isolationist," Clinton told
George Stephanopoulos in 1993, as a firefight raged in Mogadishu. "Right
now the average American doesn't see our interest threatened to the point
where we should sacrifice one American life."

President Clinton would do nothing to convince that "average American"
otherwise, and when eighteen bodybags arrived from Somalia he hastened
to arrange for US troops' departure. When the following year he was forced
to send American troops into Haiti he did it in a way certain to avoid
casualties—few Haitian paramilitaries were disarmed or other risks
taken—and the invading force suffered no casualties (while Haiti
today remains arguably worse off than before).

It was in Kosovo that the moral calculus behind this evolution became
unmistakable. During his triumphant press conference of June 10, 1999,
Secretary of Defense Cohen described marvels of technology—the fact
that "of more than 23,000 bombs and missiles used, we have confirmed
just twenty incidents of weapons going astray from their targets to cause
collateral damage." But during that very long "briefing,"
which runs to nearly thirty printed pages, the secretary of defense and
his generals said nothing of the Kosovars and what had happened to them.
Rather: "We were able to operate," said General Shelton, the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "without losses in a very robust air
defense system…."

Without losses: a war without losses. And indeed why should one complain
about Americans surviving—about a flawless war? But of course it
wasn't flawless. Perhaps one day there will be a method to calculate how
many Kosovars had to be displaced, how many had to die, for the West to
prosecute its "perfect" war. How many fewer might have died
if the "campaign" had targeted—or had plausibly threatened
to target—the men with guns who were killing and expelling the people
America's President had sworn to protect? Such a war would have held risks
for Americans; their countrymen would not have liked this. Leaders who
speak of "moral imperatives," however, should be held responsible
for their words and for persuading their people that some causes, once
embraced, are worth the risk.